Is Palin a Woman?

Jason Materra has a round-up of academic inanity concerning Sarah Palin. His examples include Catherine McNicol Stock (covered by Arts & Ammo here) whose insinuation that Palin is a racist was backed up by the logic that racists can be found in the Pacific Northwest, and Palin can be found in the Pacific Northwest, ergo . . .

But the central question seems to be one of gender:

Is Sarah Palin really a woman? That’s the type of asinine question that could originate only in academia. And, right on cue, here’s Wendy Doniger, a divinity professor at the University of Chicago, declaring an all-out assault on biology. Mrs. Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman,” the professor carped in a Washington Post blog entry. But she didn’t stop there: “The Republican party’s cynical calculation that because [Palin] has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! Wow!) she speaks for the women of America and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage.” The pernicious swipes at parenting aside, what to think about a professor who suggests that womanhood is defined by one’s devotion to leftist orthodoxy, as if doctors stamp “liberal Democrat” on every female birth certificate? For me, it’s another reminder that colleges are a reliable, if unintentional, source of comic relief.

Mary Grabar takes up the question of whether Palin is a woman and concludes, interestingly, that no, “Palin is one of the boys.” That’s what drives the feminists insane.

That Palin thinks like a man, or logically, is what has made the left livid. As appropriate to their modes, they respond emotionally. The men in their movement, who have become one of the girls in terms of thinking, respond with personal insults, even going so far as to mock the looks of her baby, as Bill Maher recently did.

In the feminized humanities departments on college campuses, Grabar argues, character assassination has become “the staple of literary scholarship.” Academia promotes women’s ways of thinking, based on emotion and consensus. Students have consequently abandoned the humanities, opting to major in more masculine fields such as business.

While anti-reason theories circulated and were repeated in academic discourse, in politics the new ethic of “caring” was promoted by Bill Clinton and in the media by women’s talk shows like Oprah, Ellen, and The View, where politics was wedged into teary discussions about makeovers in fashion and self-esteem. Barack Obama, with his “community organizer” experience, recalls the efforts of women with settlement houses, as proto-social workers.

Women — and men who think like women — rule the liberal media and grant such emotion-based politics legitimacy. But the other side of the “caring” coin is the personality-based “critical” side — a nasty, catty one, indeed.

Palin defies the feminist mold. She seems unhandicapped by her gender, working effectively in the historically male arena of politics without surrendering her femininity. Whereas feminists have insisted that women must act like men (giving up their reproductive role) and men must think like women (based on emotion and consensus building), Palin acts like a woman and thinks like a man.

That might explain why Palin polls better among men than women, and it demonstrates what a vital threat Palin is to the reigning feminist orthodoxy.